Real Wise Men
Quotes
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"Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good." - Carl Sagan.
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei.
"It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong." - Isaac Asimov.
If you can't measure it, it probably doesn't exist and/or it's probably all in the mind
"I have encountered a few 'creationists' and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind ?" - Arthur C. Clarke.
"Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing: 'does not!'" - Dr. Pepper.
Given the overwhelming body of evidence from hundreds of different scientific fields ranging from archeology to physics to zoology, can you explain to us how you can seriously believe that the world was created 2000 years after the Babylonians invented beer?"
"Several thousand years ago, a small tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories were embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject."
"The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence." - Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri (973-1057), Syrian poet.
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense."
"God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining." - Douglas Adams.
"Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science."
"Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves."
"I do not see how anyone could come fresh to the Bible and see any regard for human life at all in the early parts. From the extermination of every living thing outside the ark to the ethnic cleansing of the promised land, the story is one of utter disregard to human life except when it suits God's purposes..... it does not license anyone to preach on the excellence of the Ten Commandments as a sort of constitution document for modern society."
